What was the internet called when it was created in 1969?

On October 29, 1969, the world was humbly changed forever.

At 10:30 PM, a student programmer at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) named Charley Kline sent the letter “l” and the letter “o” electronically more than 350 miles to a Stanford Research Institute computer in Menlo Park, California. The letters stood for “login,” and the effort led to a system crash immediately afterward. But a technological revolution had begun.

That first unassuming message was the first flicker of what we now know as the Internet, but was then called ARPANET. Like many expensive, revolutionary technologies, ARPANET was funded by the U.S. military. In particular, the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network–hence the abbreviation to ARPANET.

The Cold War had the country in fear of a nuclear apocalypse, and the military needed a way to command and control their computers remotely in the case of an attack.

At the same time, the computer scientists who developed ARPANET had their own motivations. In 1969, being a computer scientist was time consuming; if they wanted computer access; they were required to schedule time on one of the few computers around the country. Scientists wanted to be able to access the information on a certain computer from where they were seated rather than travel large distances. Electronic messages were the answer.